Customer Service Tool HappyOrNot Rolls Out across 6 Countries In Europe

Nobody loves customer satisfaction and customer service surveys quite like the retail sector. It's the binary measure of what makes your in-store or online experience worthwhile and shows you where you can improve.

The trouble is, these surveys are cumbersome and take time to be filled out. Half the battle is convincing a consumer – who had a positive experience – to partake as it's generally not in their interest. However, electronics retailer ElkjÃ¸p – which is part of the Dixons Retail company – has rolled out the Happy or Not service across their stores.

The HappyOrNot device features four smiley buttons in different colours to help customers deliver simple satisfaction feedback to ElkjÃ¸p no matter where they are in Europe thanks to the language-neutral service.

Deployed over Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Czech Republic and Slovakia, HappyOrNot has seen over 1.5 million users give praise or criticism via the service since its launch in May this year.

"We hope that as many of our customers as possible will take a moment to tell us how good the service was that we provided when they were visiting us," says CEO of ElkjÃ¸p Norway, Andreas Niss. "That way, we will become even better and make our customers even more satisfied."

So far over 79 per cent of customers were satisfied with the service received on the day they visited.

While the HappyOrNot service seems a little like a gimmick on the surface, it's breaking down the barrier to customer survey's as it asks just one question and presents an immediate and tactile answer – hard for many customers to resist. Using the feedback obtained from the HappyOrNot service helps ElkjÃ¸p pinpoint their in-store efforts. I.e. if satisfaction drops consistently on a certain day of the week they can provide adequate change to staff hours, or if discounts are better or worse satisfaction rates may well change.

All in all, it's an immediate and somewhat fun way to let customers give you feedback on their in-store experience, and that's never a bad thing.

You can find out more about how to improve customer satisfaction at this year's Europe's Customer Festival, which draws upon key influencers and businesspeople from all across the customer interaction industry.